In the role of an expectant mother named Marlo in Tully—Diablo Cody’s latest film—Charlize Theron fully inhabits the bodily horrors that pregnancy and the first few postpartum weeks contain. The prosthetic belly she wears in the first 10 minutes of the film—before her character gives birth to a third child, which seemingly pushes her over the edge—is enormous and mottled; it pokes out from under her t-shirts and asserts itself at every moment. She is perpetually exhausted until Tully (the titular nanny) arrives. A stranger at a coffee shop tells Marlo that there are trace amounts of caffeine in the decaf latte she just ordered, and to spite this woman, she drinks it anyway. A nurse watches her try to pee and she lashes out. Then later, after Tully is hired, Marlo nurses her baby in the dark, in bed, while Tully grins beatifically from the shadows. Motherhood, in Cody’s eyes, is to be under a sort of surveillance.
From its trailer alone, Tully seemed like an anomaly in the nanny subgenre—a movie in which the nanny isn’t trying to kill the mother, the father, or the children, and instead wants to help. What’s less clear is the bleak magic that powers the entire enterprise, turning what could have been a heartwarming dark comedy into something much more sinister and thought provoking. The marketing teased out all the pleasing bits and elided the unsavory stuff underneath, when in fact, Tully is all about the dark spaces a new mother’s brain goes after the stress of childbirth and raising a family. (MAJOR SPOILER ahead, so proceed with caution.)
Tully is all about the dark spaces a new mother’s brain goes after the stress of childbirth and raising a family.
Marlo is a tired mother of three whose husband (Ron Livingston) is present but mostly absent. We are led to believe that they don’t have much money—especially in contrast to Marlo’s brother (Mark Duplass, not the one on Transparent), who lives in a giant modernist pile and has the kind of money that allows for a full-time nanny named Shasta and a tiki bar in his home for kicks. The brother suggests Tully to Marlo, when Marlo is days away from her due date. After a montage about the physical toll of new motherhood, Marlo acquiesces.
Tully is the type of nanny whose presence is dangerous not for sinister reasons, but because it comes abundantly clear halfway through the film that she isn’t real (that is the twist), and the danger is in the fact that she’s real in Marlo’s mind. She has no last name, no day job, and most importantly, not a single person aside from Marlo has ever laid eyes on her. Through the movie’s first half, Tully is nothing short of a miracle. The house is clean. The baby sleeps. And Marlo (Theron is remarkably good in the role) is finally able to relax into the sort of domestic goddess her suburban New York City world calls for: Indian-print sundresses, taking bread, roast chicken and green salad on the table every night for dinner. It’s all thanks to Tully, who as we learn by the film’s end—was just a figment of Marlo’s imagination—perhaps a side effect of postpartum psychosis, or just the wanderings of an overtired brain running on fumes. The life she had, where Tully helped her fulfill her fate, was a lie.